Cardinal Timothy Dolan says Church should be more welcoming to gays

The New York Cardinal said the church hasn't been the best at welcoming gays.

New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan said this weekend that the Catholic Church should be more welcoming to gays.

Dolan appeared on ABC’s “This Week” as well as “Face the Nation” on CBS, speaking out about the church’s outreach to gays and lesbians.

He maintained the definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

But he told George Stephanopoulos on “This Week,” “We’ve got to do better to see that our defense of marriage is not reduced to an attack on gay people.”

He added, “We haven’t been too good at that.”

Dolan oversaw Easter mass Sunday at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown, where he said the church was undergoing “renewal, repair, resurrection.”

Dolan was recently in Rome to help choose the new pope. After Pope Francis was appointed, he said the selection "marks a great milestone in our church."

In 2011, Dolan pushed against New York legislators’ decision to legalize gay marriage.

He told a reporter last year that he felt “burned” by the vote, because he was out of the country and caught off guard by legislators’ support for the bill. Politicians had assured him the legislation did not have much of a chance, he said.